The association of COVID-19 employment shocks with suicide and safety net use: An early-stage investigation

  1. Michihito Ando
  2. Masato Furuichi

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Abstract

This paper examines whether the COVID-19-induced employment shocks are associated with increases in suicides and safety net use in the second and third quarters of 2020. We exploit plausibly exogenous regional variation in the magnitude of the employment shocks in Japan and adopt a difference-in-differences research design to examine and control for possible confounders. Our preferred point estimates suggest that a one-percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate in the second quarter of 2020 is associated with, approximately, an additional 0.52 suicides, 28 unemployment benefit recipients, 88 recipients of a temporary loan program, and 10 recipients of public assistance per 100,000 population per month. A simple calculation based on these estimates suggests that if a region experienced a one-percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate caused by the COVID-19 crisis in the second quarter of 2020, which is roughly equivalent to the third-highest regional employment shock, this would be associated with 37.4%, 60.5%, and 26.5% increases in the total, female, and male suicide rates respectively in July 2020 compared with July 2019. These results are primarily correlational rather than causal due to the limitation of our data and research design, but our baseline findings are robust to several different model specifications.

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  1. Version published to 10.1371/journal.pone.0264829
  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.11.16.20232850v4 on medRxiv
  3. Version published to 10.1101/2020.11.16.20232850v3 on medRxiv
  4. Version published to 10.1101/2020.11.16.20232850v2 on medRxiv
  5. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.11.16.20232850: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  6. Version published to 10.1101/2020.11.16.20232850v1 on medRxiv